


Ih'tanu: Coming of Age

by Sharpiefan



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen, Occupation of Bajor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 08:36:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharpiefan/pseuds/Sharpiefan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the Cardassian Occupation, life somehow goes on... the Shakaar have a special occasion to celebrate. If they can make it that far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ih'tanu: Coming of Age

**Author's Note:**

> While DS9 is my first and oldest fandom, it has been literally years since I last watched any of it, thanks to BBC2 screwing around with the schedules when they first aired the fifth season. It doesn't help that while I taped the show when it was first aired, VHS video is no longer a format I am able to watch as we don't have a working VHS video player in the house. Therefore, I can only beg your indulgence and understanding and hope that I have not gone completely off the rails with this. All comments are welcome, though I prefer the nice ones (I suspect I am not alone in that!). This is unbeta'd.
> 
> This is my first fic in my first ever fandom.  
>  **Disclaimer:** DS9 belongs to Paramount Pictures; I make no profit from playing in this universe and I leave things neat and tidy when I'm done.

“You're not coming.” Shakaar's tone was forceful, the statement meant to be the last word on the discussion, but Kira Nerys had that stubborn look on her face that the members of the cell had grown accustomed to over the months since she had joined them. 

Lupaza finished braiding her dark hair and crossed the cave towards her two comrades, taking up position beside the youngest member of the Shakaar cell. “Edon, she's been with us for over a year. She's got to come on her first raid with us sometime. Look at her – she's got the heart of a sinoraptor.”

“Personally, I'd prefer to eat a different part of a sinoraptor than the heart,” Furel put in. Lupaza rolled her eyes and slapped his arm. Now was _not_ the time to be cracking his stupid jokes.

“Besides which,” Lupaza continued, “we're a man down already. You don't have much of a choice.”

Nerys lifted her chin and folded her arms, gazing steadily at Shakaar with those big brown eyes that saw everything.

Shakaar sighed. If this were anything but the simple hit-and-run raid it was planned to be, he would not back down. Lupaza was right though, as always. Nobody in his cell could just cruise, everyone had to pull their weight. And while Kira Nerys had been useful in the year since she had joined them, she had not yet taken part in the actual fighting.

“Fine.” He shrugged, and cracked a half-smile. “I suppose she's big enough to carry a phaser rifle. The day had to come eventually, didn't it. Lupaza, she's with you. And Nerys? If I see you more than three paces away from Lupaza, you won't be coming on another raid for a long, long time.” He turned away, ignoring the triumphant look that appeared in the youngster's eyes, and picked up his phaser rifle, checking the charge. 

“Right, everyone get your weapons and prepare to move out!”

Nerys swept strands of red hair out of her face as she grabbed a phaser rifle of her own, checking the power cell before glancing to Lupaza. The older woman was watching her with a look on her face that Nerys couldn't put a name to. It discomfited her, though. “Lu, I haven't grown a second head,” she said, slinging the rifle across her back and checking the sheath in her boot where she kept her knife.

“No, that you haven't,” Lupaza replied, checking the power cell of her own phaser rifle.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lupaza watched her charge. Nerys moved with the stealth and grace of a hara cat. In another life, another Bajor, she could have been a dancer, the older woman thought. She was born Ih'valla, Lupaza was sure. The d'jarra of artists, Lupaza's own, included musicians and dancers as well as those who made more tangible works of art. The d'jarras had gone, wiped away by necessity . The Cardassians had stolen so much from Bajor, but Lupaza was not sad that the d'jarras had gone. Her parents would have been horrified at their daughter's associating so closely with those of lower castes than their own, but Lupaza was sure that they would have seen the necessity of it.

The objective today was a passenger transport arriving from Terok Nor, the orbiting space station and ore processing center. The Shakaar cell, unlike some of the more radical groups, did their best not to catch innocent Bajorans in the cross-fire, and thus mainly focussed on purely military targets, such as this. They did not touch cargo transports because those usually included Bajoran prisoners headed for the ore-processing centre as labourers or coming back from there to go to one of the medical facilities.

It was cold tonight, so cold. The members of the Shakaar had finally got into position along the ridgeline overlooking the spaceport. It was hardly worth the name 'spaceport' – just a stretch of plascrete where skimmers and transports could land, and an ugly grey Cardassian building where passengers could wait until their transport landed. The spaceport outside the capital city was much bigger and more elaborate than this barely-used one out in Dahkur Province.

“It'll put down right there,” Furel said in an undertone – the members of the Shakaar never whispered when on raids because whispers carried. He pointed to the plascrete right outside the building.

“How d'you know?” Nerys asked, turning her head to look up at him.

He smiled grimly. “Because they always do.”

Lupaza turned her head to look at them. Her earring gleamed softly in the moonlight, and Nerys reached up to her own bare ear before shaking her head and gripping her phaser rifle.

So cold... Lupaza hoped that the cold wouldn't put the Cardassians off landing here tonight. She didn't think that she could deal with the look in Nerys' eyes if it didn't. A movement from beside her caught her eye and she turned her head a fraction. Nerys was biting her fingers, and Lupaza recognised an old trick to keep the blood flowing. It _was_ cold; she was shivering herself and had no idea how Nerys wasn't frozen half to death. 

Scratch that. She did; it was pure adrenaline and the fear that she might do something to let everyone down. Lupaza could sympathise with that, she had once been in the same situation herself.

It must have been two hours later – maybe even three – when the waiting ambushers heard the hum of the skimmer as it approached. This was going to be the most dangerous part of the whole mission: If the Cardassians thought to scan the area, they could just stand off and blast the Shakaar to bits with the skimmer's weaponry, and there was nothing that the resistance fighters could do to stop that.

“Would you look at that...” someone murmured as the skimmer descended. Supremely confident – over-confident. No resistance cell had hit a spaceport yet, not even one as out of the way as this.

The craft powered down and the door opened and a Cardassian soldier appeared in the gap and Nerys began firing, the first of the cell to do so, though phaser bolts criss-crossed the area before Lupaza could draw another breath. She was firing her own phaser rifle, trying to do as much damage as she could while conserving power; 

Gantt scrambled down the hillside, drawing phaser-fire, but miraculously he remained untouched.

There was a whine in the air, higher-pitched than the phasers, and the skimmer shuddered a little as the pilot desperately tried to power back up and take off, but Gantt had reached the craft and was working feverishly to set the improvised explosive. He was protected from the Cardassians' fire by the bulk of the skimmer itself, and the covering fire provided by his comrades meant that they were not exiting the skimmer. Eventually, he ducked away from the craft, trying to keep in the blind spot as he headed for safety, weaving a zig-zag path to try to lessen the chances of getting hit.

He made it back to the others, dropping panting behind a boulder, and tried to catch his breath. He gave a brief nod to Shakaar before rolling over, pulling his own phaser-rifle to his shoulder. The whine built and built and then the night turned to day, briefly, as the engines overloaded and blew apart.

The skimmer seemed at first to have been untouched, despite the explosion, but the engines had been knocked out of alignment. There was no return fire from the craft now, and the night seemed unnaturally quiet and very dark around them.

Lupaza's hand closed on a piece of shrapnel, warm but cooling rapidly, and she traced her thumb down one strangely-smooth edge. What it had been, she didn't know, but it had been part of the skimmer. She tucked it into her shirt, unable to think of a good reason to keep a useless piece of metal.

Shakaar and Furel were scrambling down the hillside towards the skimmer and its dead occupants, covered by the others. Lupaza should have gone too, but she had to look after Nerys, whose rapid breathing and white face told of a great personal ordeal.

Lupaza had no memory of getting back to camp, afterwards. Oh, she knew she had walked, as the others had, but she just did not remember doing it. Nerys, beside her, was quieter and more sober than Lupaza thought the Shakaar cell had ever known, but there was a determination in her tread and a look on her face that they all recognised.

Shakaar and Furel were the first back to their hideout, one of the many caves that laced the mountains of Dahkur, and they paused outside the entrance, getting into cover to count the rest of the cell in and make sure that they hadn't been followed.

“Are you all right?” Lupaza asked Nerys, once they were in and removing the rifles' spent power cells. Nerys looked up at her, startled, her eyes very wide and very dark in her too-thin face. 

“Y... Yes,” she said, though Lupaza could see the shakes starting, and reached out to take the girl's rifle from a nerveless hand. She glanced down at the weapon, and then back up at Nerys, who was looking at her with an intensity she had not seen in her before.

“I didn't let you down, did I?” she asked.

Lupaza shook her head. “No. No, Nerys, you didn't.” She smiled, though it felt forced. “You emptied your rifle's power cell completely, did you realise that?”

Shakaar came up behind Nerys then and she spun, startled, defensive. He smiled down at her, one hand on her shoulder. “That was... that was well done, Nerys. You too, Lupaza,” he added, looking up at her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Lupaza wasn't sure, at first, what to do with the small piece of shrapnel she had brought away from the skimmer, but by the next day, she knew exactly what to do with it. She was Ih'valla and her parents had both been artists. Her mother was a musician, but it was her father who had taught Lupaza his skills. Her father, who had crafted earrings, in a tradition handed down from his father. Lupaza had no brothers and not much skill with music – that had gone to her sister – so her father had passed on what little he could of his skills before he died. He had not been able to make his daughter's earring, as his own father had for him at his coming-of-age, so Lupaza wore his earring in his memory.

It was growing rarer in these days of privation and hunger, need and war, to see Bajorans wearing earrings that declared their d'jarra, their caste, but Lupaza's earring did so. It was a thing of beauty, delicate filigree-work with a light chain joining the earring to its cuff. Lupaza could not duplicate the delicacy of it, and did not try, working with the few tools she had. She formed a half-circle, as light and delicate as she could, and engraved it, working by hand. This earring would be a warrior's, for a girl with a warrior's heart and a dancer's grace. 

The chain she forged, link by link, murmuring the old prayers, the old chants. She monopolised one of the few powered lights the cell owned, to better see her work, but none of the cell complained about her selfishness. They all knew that she was doing something important, something to keep alive the old ways, the Bajor they fought for.

Occasionally, Nerys would come to her, to try to draw her into the circle of chatter that she had forsworn while she did this work, and each time one of the others would distract the girl, so that Lupaza could work undisturbed on a precious thing.

It took a week, a week of continuous labour and craft, a week of intense concentration, but it was finally done. Forged in duranium, hard as Nerys' eyes when she looked on her enemy, light as a song, as the laughter that the Shakaar cell heard so rarely, beautiful as Bajor.

The cell gathered in a circle, Lupaza to Shakaar's right. Furel, poet, singer, fighter, stood on Shakaar's left, and at a quick motion of Shakaar's hand, Furel stepped forward. Nerys frowned a little. This was going to be no ordinary mission briefing, then.

“We are fighting for a free Bajor,” Furel said, looking around. “But sometimes to fight means more than to carry weapons, to kill our oppressors. Sometimes, to fight means to reject unjust laws, to celebrate in the face of oppression. We have become each other's family, here, and we want to share this time with those we care about. This, though we have no vedek, no ranjen, this is a celebration of Kira Nerys' ih'tanu.”

Nerys gasped, her eyes going wide. 

“Nerys is one of us. She has fought alongside us, accepted food and water, warmth and light from us, is willing to die with us and so she has become an adult with us.”

There were nods and smiles around her, but Nerys saw none of them, her eyes looking from Furel's face to Shakaar's to Lupaza's, and back again.

This was not how an ih'tanu was supposed to go – there were supposed to be prayers and songs and laughter – but it was more than she had imagined her ih'tanu would be, when she had been in the Singha refugee camp. There had been little inclination to think and dream, and less time, but still she had dreamed. And hoped.

Nerys did not remember much of what happened after that. She knew that it had hurt, a brief sharp pain, when Shakaar had pierced her ear – a part of the rite that had always been done by the head of the household in the Bajor before the Occupation. 

There were smiles and laughter, and dancing firelight, she remembered that.

Her new earring hung from her ear, an unaccustomed weight. But the acceptance of the Shakaar cell - _her_ cell, her friends – lightened her heart. With friends like these, who believed in her, who believed in _Bajor_ , there was hope for a future. And she began to hope that she might be there to see it when Bajor rose from the ashes.

Ih'tanu. It meant 'hope for the future'.


End file.
